Breath of the World
by Admirale
Summary: It would have been called Armageddon, but nature had always been clever through the eons. Katie Hall had been born into loving arms, even amidst the tumult of the third world, round and blue.


**Preface:** Well, first off, this is my first fic. I hope it's a satisfactory addition to the Day After Tomorrow archive. Now, let me introduce myself. I've been involved in the fanfiction community for years, but only as a lurking reader, initially as a Star Wars fan, then a very active Harry Potter addict. I've been Beta Reading HP work for some time now through Portkey (where I work under the alias "Another"), so I think I'm fairly qualified for a newbie author, even if it's a separate fandom. I watched DAT last week for the first time, and instantly fell in love with it. I've always been a shipper, and Laura and Sam make no exception, but I'm a guy, so it took the science fictional ambience of DAT to inspire me to actually publish. I bought the DVD today, too. Which brings me to the wonderful tagline common to all genres of fanfiction, because that DVD's one of few things that I actually do own.

**Disclaimer:** I don't own anything or anyone you recognize. The rest is mine.

**Author's Note:** This is my sequel to Day after Tomorrow. After the first scene, we jump forward many years in time and review the past, which actively occurs later in the story. I'm looking for a general reaction to the underlying situation; this chapter is really just an appetizer for the overall taste of my plotline. The real story will continue where Sam and Laura leave off. So please review! I crave some good criticism here, and if stupid mistakes abound ever which way, then please don't hesitate to berate me for it. Now, without further ado, I most humbly present the zeroth chapter, the foundation, the rez de chaussé of "Breath of the World."

**Summary:** It would have been called Armageddon, but nature had always been clever through the eons. Katie Hall had been born into loving arms, even amidst the tumult of the third world, round and blue. Please RR!

**Breath of the World - Prologue**

"Hush, Katie girl," she whispered, gently covering her six-month-old's tiny mouth with her left hand. "I know it's early, even for you, miss four-in-the-morning. But we have to leave right now. . . . shhh, honey, it'll be alright, you're just going for a car ride with Mommy and Daddy. I know you love it when we all go together."

As the infant Katie Hall became readjusted to being awake, her mother began hurriedly collecting blankets and a warm set of tiny clothes from the closet when the room shook again. Turning around instinctively and rushing to her daughter, Katie's mother was met with another blast from outside and lost her footing, sending the infant into an even louder fit of tears.

"Sam!" the mom cried, standing up quickly and scooping Katie up from the crib, "The impacts are getting closer! I can see where they are hitting from the window. We have to get out of here right now!"

Her husband swung the pack he was busily stuffing with supplies over his shoulder and ran to the other room, extending his hand to his wife, which she quickly took. "Come on, the motor's already running," he said, giving her cheek a kiss to reassure her of his presence.

The next missile exploded only a few hundred yards away, and the shockwave was maddening. Releasing the breath she hadn't realized she was holding, Laura nodded and followed him to the hydrogen-powered truck they had helped to engineer.

"But where are we going?" she questioned.

"I don't really know, but anywhere's better than here. I can't believe they're actually attacking the United States."

Laura still clutching Katie tightly to her chest, who was now bawling in terror at the nearing impacts and increasing shaking, they carelessly hurled the things they had gathered in the back seat and strapped themselves in.

The truck very quickly arrived at the main crossroads of the American refugee camp in Mexico, and Sam was forced to slow down, unsure of which way to turn. The rightward path led further South, to the capital, and the leftward road wound its way back to the frozen American soil.

"The radio said there was a force of ground troops advancing northward from the southern Mexican states. We have to go back. . . ." Laura interjected helpfully.

"But the whole hemisphere is a giant icebox! We'd never make it past thirty-five north. And we barely have anything with us."

"What choice is there? Either we risk a close encounter with someone's army or we risk finding food and shelter back home."

After a short pause, Sam conceded, "You're right, Laura. Here we go. . . ." The truck's raucous engine roared as he coaxed the throttle lever forward and they began to accelerate. Expert driving had them cruising down the highway, headlights illuminating the night, the stars above the United States twinkling softly on the horizon. "How's Katie?" he asked, glancing at his beautiful daughter, who had quieted down and was snuggling contentedly against her mother.

Laura smiled first at their baby, and whispered something Sam couldn't make out to her, and then leaned to put her head on his shoulder. "Oh, she'll be fine. You know how much she likes traveling."

Her sweet eyes were melting through his heart, and it was all he could do to pay at least a little attention to the road and not put his arms around her.

"Laura?" he spoke.

"Hmm. . . ."

"I love you."

"I love you too," she answered with a wordless kiss.

Even before her first birthday, Katie had learned what love was and how it felt to be loved. Despite her parents' exceedingly busy lives as combination workers, teachers, and students, they had always flooded her with their flowing love for one another and for her. Even in the midst of the Third World War.

* * *

It was a quiet autumn day, the auburn winds rushing through her flowing hair, the cool breeze intertwining the dark tresses that dangled from the back of her coat as the breeze played over the sandy plain. The frozen remnants of a grove of once-majestic Sonora cacti could be made out in the ground to her left, the endless sky above the unique trail of footsteps in the chilled ground behind, which led from her fully-charged electric Jeep down the path that she had subconsciously selected as a good route home.

Despite her word-class judgment of terrain and her impeccable navigational skills, not only did this path not seem to want to end quickly enough, but the soles of her feet were beginning to feel blistered, her lungs strangely drained, and her nose as cold as the heart of a murder. It all added up to an absolutely perplexing situation. Here she was, standing still, somewhere on a beautiful Arizona day in the middle of the desert, freezing.

The landscape she saw spread before her now had probably been a desert once, ages ago, when the world still assumed that the earth would endlessly continue to support billions upon billions of uncaring, unaware human drones as the numbers were driven up exponentially. Now, it was hardly a petty excuse for a semi-arid valley, what with the morning dew that still had yet to burn off. The earth had changed, and the centuries-old names for places were slow to accommodate the new conditions. Conditions that, as this ridiculously tedious experiment strived to prove, could now be accurately predicted and plotted from here to the end of time. The decade-long project to this end was nearing its final stages, and as its director, she was feeling more than petty anxiety or simple apprehension.

Her gaze returned forward, and she continued on into the sun, that, for all its brightness, was all but powerless to give the world the warmth it had once enjoyed. It would be midday by now, the sun hung at its zenith, slowly preparing for its inexorable western descent, and yet the earth beneath her was still laden with a thin layer of ice. _Some desert, indeed_, she thought.

The distinct crackling, that sound of the crisply frozen sand giving way to her feet, had fallen into a sort of rhythm as she marched towards the towering mountain that would have overshadowed her at any other time of day. Yet a glance at the beautiful panorama that somehow had come to grace the whole of the planet never ceased to capture a heartbeat.

The scene before her was so serene, so glassy, so perfect beyond imagining, that on some deep, primal level she understood. Understood why mother nature had made the choice she had. But another part of her missed the life she had nearly been born into; a life of carefree growth, of uninhibited choice, of nurturing education, of wonder, all in preparation for a future that would not ever come to pass. She was a proud member of the next generation, but still, there was always the agonizing torture of listening to stories of before. Her parents had always been vivacious storytellers, always full of life in their many wonderful years, which, thankfully, were still yet to come to an end.

Realizing that she had once again stopped moving after waking from her reverie, she reluctantly resumed the long trek back to her home. At least the long trek back to where she lived. It really wasn't fair to call it "her home" per se, since she shared the same home with the few thousand American refugees that had survived and their descendants. . . .

At the same time, it was the only home she had ever known. The greatest natural disaster in the whole of history, a cataclysmic series of continent-sized super-storms, had claimed the three and a half billion lives north of the equator in the span of a week. As if a direct punishment for the "modern" world's industrial abuse of the planet's resources, temperatures around the hemisphere had dropped halfway to absolute zero, plastering the snowy surfaces of North America, Europe, and Asia with deep sheets of ice. A dream fit for an Eskimo, only a particularly resourceful and determined handful of United States citizens had come out alive.

Graciously, the UN had set up refugee camps for millions upon millions upon millions of survivors world-wide in countries like Kenya, Bolivia, Botswana, Mexico in record time, backed by the entire economic and political strength of the countries of the European Union, Canada, the United States, Russia, and China. A loosely-knit world-wide alliance had formed, and for a time, the Miss American ideal of World Peace was in sight.

Resentment from years of animosity and mistrust, however, finally overpowered the Good Samaritan mentality that had temporarily come over the world. Tragically, the hosting "third world countries" eventually decided to take advantage of the once powerful modern world, recalling delegation to the UN and demanding complete surrender from their Northern neighbors. Naturally, no one could ever convince the ex-military superpowers of the world to officially cede all their assets to the peoples to whom they had once exported their menial and manual labor. The issue of the diminishing food supply put even more pressure on both sides to win, and tension continued to burgeon until it inevitably boiled over.

World War III lasted all the 28 days of February. In the most horrific showdown ever conceived, North pitted against South, only on a global scale, the world managed to annihilate the half that hadn't been wiped out by the storms. In a great testimony to the strength and the resolve of the human heart, each side fought valiantly, and the outcome was a marginal victory, with total losses numbering in the billions. The world had become a graveyard; half frozen, half burnt.

As if shaking its head in disgust, the solar system swiftly responded to the temper tantrum of its third little planet, round and blue, flinging Earth some 15 million kilometers farther away from the sun. Temperatures suddenly dived below the scales, and the world spun quietly in the dark edge of the sun's hospitable zone, like a misbehaving child sent to take a time-out.

Although a complete inconvenience—it meant that every map and calendar in the world was suddenly wrong—the consequences had been anything but gradual. The mean was suddenly reduced to about -30°C, as per the most conservative estimates. Contiguous America, just above the Tropic of Cancer, stood a snowflake's chance in hell. Or rather, a dying coal ember's chance in the dim void of space.

There hadn't been the intense distortion of the Polar Vortices, with the ultra-chilled air from the mesosphere being drawn down to the troposphere, like the original super-storms; the world simply had one more phase of atmospheric housekeeping to execute.

The deterioration of all of civilization was inevitable, and as more and more of the second round of survivors succumbed to the lack of natural resources that had once been taken for granted, the stakes began to get higher and higher. The few million who still drew breath were sprinkled out randomly across the continents, and that number had dwindled to a million in a fortnight, then to a several hundred thousand, and finally to just over fifty thousand.

Such was the world she had been born into, and there wasn't a soul on the planet that didn't know precisely what had happened and why. It was part of the reason there were never to be any forms of fossil-fuel-burning machinery or weapons of mass destruction ever built or used again. In the last international act for two decades, the skeletons of world government had issued a decree which directly forbade most of what the international economy had been based upon and gave climatologists the legal powers of God.

It was simply impossible and unfeasible to be concerned with foreign relations when your entire population could be counted and surveyed in less than 24 hours and your entire food supply could be inventoried in half that time. One by one, each nation was reduced to shreds by starvation and temperature.

But people had always been clever through the eons, from the witty cave-dweller that had realized the incredible value of flame to the ingenious minds of the scientists who had plotted the human genome. Just as the children of each new generation knew the trials and tribulations of their parents, they knew the names of two resourceful people who had found a way to begin anew and take advantage of the fresh planet before them.

Having witnessed the drastic behavior of nature, heaven had graciously decided to come to the aid of the future's progenitors and presented the cold earth with a much-needed gift: invoking the memory the ghastly expanse of icy tundra whose mountainous shelves tessellated the world like the forgotten tectonic plates, came the revolution in modern science and civilization known through the immortal names of the two young Americans that had made it possible.

_They had always known how to find the answers, although this time it had taken them a few tries to get it right_, she remembered. . . .

* * *

It had been _their_ idea, after all, to harness the geothermal power from the vents that were cracking through the ice all over the world, while others simply complained that widespread volcanic activity was a sign of core instability. It was strangely fitting then, that no one gave either the time of day. Theywere, after all, only nineteen. Still, as more and more people neighbors fell victim to the increasing cold, theyknew its was right, and by illicitly acquiring one of the government's last surviving Cray supercomputers, _they _were eventually able to develop a model power collection unit (environmentally pristine and efficient beyond all preconceived notions thereof). Preliminary analyses held the promise of being able to generate energy just enough to sustain the last American city on the planet if it could be mass produced, as well as set up for actual use.

In short, they had integrated all their knowledge and skills into one revolutionary device, and simply needed to find a way to replicate a fair number of them and then network them. A friend, an ex-software engineer, had promised to write a simple operating system that would complement the hardware.

The one major task left before them was to design everyday household items like light bulbs, heaters, and batteries that could make use of the energy produced. Although hardly a daunting step compared to the initial technology, it was critical.

Before they could officially publish the fruit of their research and begin working on the actual implementation and application of their geothermic creation to the never-ending winter, the debacle that would later be dubbed the Silent Morning took place.

There were some ten-thousand-odd survivors from the whole of the North American continent now living in crude lean-tos and shacks or worse in the hottest place they could find: the deserts of the southwestern US states and Mexico. The earth, it seemed, was not in a good way. In a raging electric storm, one night, a bolt of lightning somehow burned through the barren soil and sparked a trans-continental gas line that been long abandoned for decades, which triggered a chain reaction along the vast web of pipelines. The city-camps of survivors in Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico were consumed in a matter of minutes, along with all but a few hundred human lives in the dark hours before the motionless dawn.

God, it seemed, was sieving through his children and pruning the unworthy. It would have been called Armageddon, but human breath was still being drawn, and in a strangely primeval twist of fate, despite public resentment for their steadily worsening predicament, the few survivors in the Northwestern hemisphere were among the most resourceful, quick-thinking, strong, and talented the human gene pool had to offer. The Darwinian precept of the survival of the fittest had held true to the letter.

After the smoky haze had cleared, they had returned to the mountain, prototype power device intact, only to receive the greatest shock imaginable. At long last, the mountain had cooled in the subzero temperatures and the magma had receded to warmer depths. Their ears were met not with the familiar whirring hiss of the geothermal vents, but with the sound of icicles chiming to the rhythm of the clear winds. Theories abandoned and the device left high on the rocks, they returned home as little more than failed high-school dropouts in the fast-closing eyes of society.

Those who remained to live on had quickly reorganized, and in the first election held in months, the new government was established. A joint council of nine advisors to the state was given nearly supreme power. The executive triumvirate among nine was comprised of the brilliant paleoclimatologist, Jack Hall, who had predicted the super-storms, the former Secretary of State, and Air Force Lieutenant General Hank Weir.

Temperatures began to drop further within days after the fires had stopped, finally leveling out at an average of -40 degrees, which, ominously enough, was the one number constant both in centigrade and the older traditional scale.

Immediately, finding a solution to the steadily worsening predicament had become the number one priority, in fact a simple necessity, to find a way to escape the intense cold and continue to survive. Ideas abounded but viable options were scarce. Tunneling towards the core was the most logical option, but neither the machinery nor the manpower to accomplish such a feat existed. Small, wood-fueled fires seemed to be the only feasible scheme for providing every human body with enough heat to maintain 37°C.

But the rudimentary practice was not indefinitely sustainable. Nearly all vegetation had died, as had nearly all fauna, and trees were in short and shorter supply. While wood could, in essence, be "mined" by hacking through the thick layers of sleet and snow in areas that had once been religiously preserved natural forests, there would never be a way to maintain the process beyond a few short years.

The eyes of all once again turned towards those they had once thought little better than inferior and incapable children, the two that had proposed the now-unattainable geothermic solution to the inevitable decay of life as the world had come to know it over the past ten thousand years.

Now sprawled out across the sands of Death Valley were the homes—tents, really—of the 717 blessed souls who had passed the world's many tests. Each group of ten tents was given a name, and every inhabitant of those ten dwellings shared that name. Some knew each other, some didn't. Some disliked each other, and others were family. But every single man, woman, and child knew the names of the two familiar young adults that lived in tent 314. One particularly calm and warm (-20°C) evening, from that tent, came the answer to humanity's prayers: another source of power, of untapped energy, that had always been present, but its potential never realized.

The super-storms were once regarded as mostly terrible natural disasters, but with each other's help, the same two bright people that had considered volcanic activity as a source of power had discovered, in the frozen snow, a mysterious half-weight hydrogen isotope that consisted of the usual proton and a strange new particle with a complement of two quarks instead of three. Speculative analysis (the preferred way of saying "guessing") led to the belief that the super-cool temperatures of the outer atmosphere had transformed a sizable amount of water into its Einstein-Bozeman condensed form, producing this new isotope during the atmospheric exchange of the super-storms.

A sudden seemingly spontaneous implosion on a relatively small scale immediately alerted them to its unique properties and diverted all their attention to the new substance. Mere days later, at a presentation to the newly formed council, with only five of the nine in attendance to the teenager's report of their discovery, there had been an offbeat chorus of "Great! Chemists all through the world will start jumping up and down! Just what we all need. . . ."

In the moment that forever reserved them each a front-row seat for the future, one of the most powerful messages they had ever delivered gracefully danced off their lips, the two of them finishing each other's sentences seamlessly: "This new element . . . makes an isotopic, lighter form of water. . . . And that light water . . . is the activating catalyst for. . . ."

**A/N: **Well, I can't very well tell you what _it_ is now and spoil it, can I?

In spite of the gravity of their situation, in reality, the pages of their lives were only just beginning to unfold. While it's a true blessing when a disaster unites the world, and the super-storms had done just that, at least in the beginning, there's little adventure to be had. Clearly then, the Puritans had been wrong: there was nothing sinful with having a little fun; the gods, it seemed, were craving a little divine excitement.

* * *

Presently, Katie Hall resumed her long journey homeward. And like the world had done, she took a deep breath. She held it in for a long while, looking all around her, watching the horizon as the she spun ever faster, the world spiraling into her eyes, her deep and knowing eyes. She and world remembered the pain and suffering of generations past, the joy and love of days far gone, the unchanging sickle of death, the innumerable seasons of endless time, flowering spring, crisp autumn, and glowing summer.

In unison with the world, she answered the call of the wild with a simple "Thanks" that said all that needed to be said, all that a thousand words count not, all that could be said of the second chance humanity had been given. Although a race of sinners that would never be anything more or less, she prayed that humanity would finally learn not to lose confidence from defeat, but to learn from it.

Finally, their icy, cleansing breaths were released, and she and the world continued on.

* * *

**A/N:** So, what do we think? Average? Good? Bad? Poor? Sick? Weird? Confusing? Complicated? Silly? Great? Too short? Please tell me! I desperately want to know!

One more thing: as I mentioned previously, I'm a veteran Beta Reader for the HP fandom, but I can't very well beta my own work, so I'm looking for a kind soul who would be willing to preview my work for me. So, if you're interested. . . . Either way, drop me a review. I can be contacted at the email address listed in my profile.


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